Good software design is not complete without understanding good UI design. And in the same way good website software is not complete unless it is able to be found by people in search engines. Getting ranked in search engines is actually relatively simple for the person or dev team which has the time and resources to build their content and pages and website suitably.

Build it and they will come looks good in the movies, but in reality you have to do certain things to be found by an engine. You need to do other things to be indexed completely. You need to do another set of things to ensure the engine understands the content it is reading. Plus there are a few more things that can increase your "trust" with engines which ensures that your new content is immediately trusted.

The over-arching goal of good website design is to ensure the page is easily found and easily understood by a search engine. If you take the time to do that - it will rank well. Here are 36 tips and secrets for improving your search engine rankings. In future posts I will go into more detail on these factors.

KEYWORDS

1 Keyword in domain name – try get a domain with your keyword phrase in it

2 Keyword phrase in URL - Using url_rewriting, place appropriate title and keywords in the url. Place the title/subject first, followed by the keyword

Keywords - Header

3 Keyword in title tag – put the keyword in title tag on all relevant page within that theme

4 Keyword in description meta tag – put the keyword in the description meta tag within that theme

5 Keyword in keyword metatag – as above. Ensure the keywords are present in the body text. Ensure the keywords relate to the actual content and the theme. Off-topic keywords may confuse the spider.

Keywords - Body

6 Keyword in H1 - Keyword is included in H1 on all pages

7 Keyword font - you can make the keyword on the page bolded so that the engine easily understands the current page, but it may contribute to your page being seen as over-optimized and incur a penalty.

8 Keyword prominence (how early in page/tag) - DO NOT keyword stuff. Keywords should be used in a natural sentence near the top of the page. Evidence exists to show Google (particularly) is able to exclude border content, it can determine what is natural content and what are ads, menus, promo fluff etc.

Keywords – off page and inbound

9 Keyword in alt/title text - In navigation (next/prev icons) keyword and subject are included. Use title tags for keywords, not alt tags because they are reserved for visual assistance needs.

10 Keyword in links to site pages (anchor text) – Links that point to the current page should use the exact same keywords phrase. This makes it very easy for the engine to determine the theme and topic of the page. Spread the inbound links evenly so all pages get a “vote” and this will improve the indexing and ranking of all pages. This is an extremely important off page item.

NAVIGATION

INTERNAL LINKS

11 Keywords - links contain the subject (not keywords) and the being "linked to" contain the keyword + subject in the URL.

12 All internal links valid? - Ensure that all internal links are valid. Ensure you don't have broken links on your front page. Ensure that absolutely every page has a vote for (a link to) the front page.

13 Tree structure - All pages are easily found via a suitable theme/index page, linked down from a main keyword page. Avoid ajax paging, the engine views the page as plain text so it may not see the next page in the ajax javascript.

14 Intra-site linking – Themeing. Links between pages with the same keyword. This cn be done as a prev/next button that has the name of the page and keywords in the alt or title text of the image. Don't use buttons.

15 Sitemap.com - Google and Yahoo request a sitemap or urllist showing the exact url, so they can do a complete crawl of the site – urllist used to be used by yahoo but didn't scale at all because it was a single text page and is therefore no longer used. Sitemaps scale well because the initial page is an index page.

16 Querystrings – Avoid querystrings like the plague. Engines sometimes do not do a full crawl of those pages – although using a sitemap will fix this and ensure a complete crawl. Instead use url_rewrite. All modern languages support url_rewriting. You have complete ability to modify the url by using this technique to ensure your pages can be easily understood by the engine.

OUTGOING LINKS

16 Anchor Text – the text used in the link is a contributing factor to help the engine figure out the theme and topic of the page. Pay close attention to your keyword phrase of the page and use it consistently. This helps to avoid confusion for the engine.

17 Link stability over time – Stability also assists in building trust and in helping the engine figure out what the page is about. Do not have all your pages poin to the most recent items – in this way their links are constantly changing. Point to the 20 items immediately prior – in this way all pages have 20 votes to it from another item in the same theme, published around the same time. In this way churn is avoided and the engine is less confused.

18 All external links valid? - If you can, ensure your links pointing out are valid..

19 Less than 100 links out total - Google says limit links on a page to <100. If you can, make the number of items on an index page admin configurable.

ON-Page Factors

20 File Size - Page size depends on the amount of information contained in the feed but is usually relatively small.

21 Hyphens in URL - Use hyphens between words

22 Freshness of Pages - Fresh content is ideal.

23 Freshness - Amount of Content Change.Regularly adding new content is ideal. Ratio of old pages to new pages may be evaluated.

24 Freshness of Links - New links vs old links. Very old links may be trusted more.

25 Frequency of Updates The more you update, the more they spider. They spider the entire site, removing items from their index that are no longer there.

26 Page Theming Pages have similar items and related items

27 Keyword stemming and applied semantics - Google understands that similar words are related. We allow you have multiple related search terms (different spellings, plurals, related words) all grouped and exposed as a single keyword. Google knows all these words are related.

28 URL length - Truncate enormous length subjects so they do not create difficulties.

ON-SITE Factors

29 Larger sites (lots of pages) are presumed to be better funded, better organized, better constructed, and therefore better sites.

Other issues

Indexing

30 Sitemaps.com – Sitemaps should ensure a complete indexing of your pages. It may not to be primarily used, you can get by without having one. URLList is no longer used, single file, didn't scale.

31 Site design – By using themes, by grouping common pages, by having good navigaton (using index pages) you can ensure a complete crawl.

32 Next/prev page within theme – this is a good way to connect similarly themed content to each other for users and for spiders

33 Next prev/prev theme – this is a good way to connect themes to ensure a complete index by spiders

34 “Long tail” content – You can add a forum, a reBlogger and a reNNTP to your website to increase the amount of content on your website. Each page may attract 5 visitors per month, but if you have enough content that can amount to a significant amount of new visitors.

Trustrank

35 Google has a trustrank and it is internal and not published publically so it cannot be “gamed” the same way pagerank was gamed again and again. There is no way to minimize the impact of whether the engine trust your site or not. If they have determined you are an authority on the topic, all your on-topic content will be elevated in the rankings. New content will immediately rank well. Being trusted in your theme is something you acquire over time.

36 Wikipedia and authority sources – Having links to similarly themed authority pages will assist the engine in determining the topic and the theme of the current page. Linking to the well known authorities can increase your trust as being an authority.

Get a free 20 point SEO health-checkup for your website

I am the creator of http://www.TopXML.com and I have worked in the SEO industry for several years building tools and services for other SEO companies to use. I am an experienced SEO and have assisted dev teams to correctly design several sites.

If you are interested, I can assist you by doing a "health check" for your website design. I am available on an hourly basis to transfer knowledge and assist your dev team to build sites that are discoverable in the engines.

Contact me (markwilson@topxml.com) if you want further per-hour assistance.